"When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar, Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken, On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning's dying star, "I think of thee, (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!) Whose great and noonday splendors the many share and see, While sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me. What is the piper piping when the thin sweet sound comes down the valley like water dripping from stair to rocky stair, or "petals from blown roses on the grass"? You do not need to guess. You know it is in absolute accord with the night breeze and the long shadows and the hylas fluting in the year. It is music only, and all your heart answers is: "Piper, pipe that song again." Here, too, is that poignant lament, To a Dog's Memory. "The gusty morns are here, When all the reeds ride low with level spear; All Matthew Arnold's musical place names in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gypsy: the "Ilsley Downs", "the track by Childsworth Farm", "the Cumner range", "the stripling Thames at Bablock Hythe"-these are emulated in a not inferior accent in the sombre music of this threnody. Almost, remembering the flowers in Lycidas, you long to strew them on her darling's grave. "There is a music fills The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills For those who knew her this poem carries a footnote of poignant history. She was in London when letters came from home, and were opened in a quaint restaurant, the Apple Tree Inn, a vegetar resort where three merry souls were met to be glad over lentils and strange innocences of diet cunningly spiced to resemble the ensanguined viands repudiated and abhorred. She opened her letter and read, and her young-always young and childlike-face trembled into an unbelieving grief. She could not speak. The day was dead for her and those for whom she would have made the constant spark in it and afterward the memory. On the heels of the ill tidings she went with one friend to whom she could not tell the news, but whom she asked not to leave her, to Hampstead Heath, and the two sat all the afternoon in silence on a secluded slope, their feet in English green and her eyes unseeingly on the sky. Her dog was dead. There are those for whom the conduct of life, either a passion or a malaise, according to individual temperament, transcends even the magic of pure fancy. For them there are trumpet calls in this book, perhaps the most widely known and praised, The Kings, its last stap the battle-cry of the faint yet brave: "To fear not possible failure, This is metal for sounding clarions. And so too is The Knight Errant: the second stanza an epitome of grand quotable abstractions: "Let claws of lightning clutch me And glory make me proud. Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword, A short life in the saddle, Lord! You find admonishing whispers from a mind grown expert in counsel: "Take Temperance to thy breast, Of all that shall thee betide; For better than fortune's best Is mastery in the using, And sweeter than anything sweet Here is the reflective, the scholastic, penetrating the hall of song and hushing more abounding measures to its own consecrating uses. She was in love, not with death as it was the poetic fashion to be in a past era of creative minds, but with gentle withdrawals, fine appreciations of ultimate values, cloistral consecrations. Her steady hand on the reins of her horses of the sun, they took the heavenly track of world-old orbits, not galloping at will, now high, now low, from sunrise to the evening star. And this not because she feared, like Icarus, to fall, but that she was perpetually referring beauty to its archetype; she had, to paraphrase her own words, "eternity in mind." "Waiting on Him who knows us and our need, If she had been more rather than less in love with life, not as a trinket she could relinquish with no ado, but a mysterious ardor it was anguish to dream of losing, if she could have besought her Lord, in moments |